Why did BPM fail? - A critical analysis of old-school Business Process Management & two lifelines

[@gonan62]

Very good! It's time to expand the BPM to help optimize and improve the delivery of value. It's necessary to integrate different disciplines and tools, to help the business from the Design, Simulation, Analysis, Dashboards and evolve the structure of the applications to record the events and that they are easily extracted for analysis. Long life to BPM!

[@jagex4me]

So the concept of BPM did not fail. The snags it ran into triggered the creation of the two lifelines being Process Mining and RPA.

[@wilvdaalst]

Agree.

[@kalan4787]

What is easy to say is that BPM did not accomplish the goals that it set out to achieve, but that was mostly due to egregiously overhyped ideations of the amount of effort that it would take to monitor a living business process in a meaningful enough way that the business sponsors of those efforts could feel empowered that they were still in possession of decision making authority. I also think the intention to define OneTrueWay processes undercut the effort because politics invariably come into play when "there can be only one." Further exacerbating the issue is that implementation of BPM-centric solutions requires some fairly decently advanced skillsets, companies naively thought that anyone who had a degree was naturally imbued with these skills, then they death marched them into mine fields that were far too heavily mined for them to traverse successfully. That, in my opinion, was how it "failed."

[@wilvdaalst]

I agree with what you say. However, I would add that old-school BPM-ers tend to resist data-driven approaches and stick to practices that only make sense in less digitalized environments.

[@bc4198]

​@@wilvdaalstOof, that's a painful truth! It runs face first into the famous quotes about solving problems with the same thinking that caused them. And I've found it is especially challenging to solve problems with the same *_people_* that caused them! They created these systems because they thought they were right, so they don't want to hear us say otherwise.

[@bc4198]

"We had an army of people building this problem for decades (if not centuries). It's been six months since you graduated - why haven't you fixed it yet?!"

[@manueld7643]

😳 p̲r̲o̲m̲o̲s̲m̲